Hope drains from Iowa town

White was the color everyone wanted to see. It was a color few people would find.

As the Cedar River swelled with a vengeance Thursday, it swallowed all but a handful of homes in this eastern Iowa hamlet of nearly 1,000. Those who fled earlier had made sure to leave something white tied to their front doors -- a sign to rescue crews that they were safe and gone.

They knotted cotton rags over doorknobs. Tucked robe sashes into door frames. Tied scarves around rusty nails normally used to hang holiday decorations.

“When the water was rising everywhere, all I could see was street after street of fluttering white,” said Thomas Sanders, 59, a steel fabricator who has spent his life here. “It gave me hope.”

But hope and optimism are now in short supply. On Monday, as people returned to size up the effects of the state’s historic floods, they found a devastated community.

All around, the familiar had become the surreal. Coffee-brown water marks and bits of twig left thick lines beneath the windows of the local firehouse and marked the community’s only church. Inside antique shops along Vinton Street, ornately carved drawer knobs and faded floral china, from the days when covered wagons crossed this part of the country, were covered in silt.

“Some people are saying, ‘The town will die,’ ” said City Clerk Trisca Smetzer. “Other people are trying to stay optimistic. It’s hard to do that when everyone you know is hurting.”

Life in this working-class town nine miles northwest of Cedar Rapids has long moved at a leisurely pace. Most residents have worked either at local manufacturing operations or made the short commute to jobs in the state’s second- largest city.

There’s no grocery store here, no school, not even enough car traffic to warrant a stoplight.

In the days after the floodwaters rose, neighbors reached out to one another. And as they scattered, they checked on each other by cellphone. By Sunday night, word spread that they would be allowed to return to try to salvage what they could.

On Monday morning, hundreds of residents crowded around National Guard trucks at one of the main checkpoints into town. The line of vehicles waiting to enter stretched for more than a quarter of a mile.

One by one, residents begged Linn County sheriff’s deputies to let them go home. Each time the deputies checked a list to find out whether the property had been inspected and deemed safe.

Many were not. Among the many residents who were told to wait, patience ran thin. Some begged the deputies to look the other way and let them sneak by. Some cried.

“Please, I have to see what’s left,” said a sunburned woman, venting her frustration. “I have no clean clothes. I have no pictures of my family. I have meat in the freezer, nearly $300 worth. I might be able to save at least that.”

A weary-looking deputy checked her driver’s license against his list. Her house hadn’t been cleared by inspectors, so she would have to wait.

Besides, the deputy warned, “it’s been days since the power was turned off. The weather’s been warm and the floodwaters were contaminated. Whatever you do, ma’am, don’t eat anything you find in there.”

Sanders was among the lucky ones to get in early. He arrived Monday afternoon, escorting his mother, Elise, 89, whose home is around the corner from his.

When the floodwaters came, Sanders quickly grabbed a toothbrush, deodorant and a couple days’ worth of clean clothes. He stayed with a nephew in Cedar Rapids -- where the same rising river forced the evacuation of at least 24,000 residents and submerged hundreds of city blocks.

“When I left, I was convinced I would be back in a day or two,” Sanders said. “I’d lived through the floods here in 1961, when the water washed over the merry-go-round in our playground. I watched the waters rise in ’93 and barely wet the inside of my basement.”

But the National Weather Service said early data showed the Cedar River cresting in the area Friday at over 31 feet, more than 11 feet above the previous record.

Sanders and his mother walked by her home first. The cloth tied around the door handle was entirely blackened. A few minutes later, they reached his wood-framed ranch house.

Nearly everything inside was soiled or caked with mud. The history buff’s collection of 1930s and 1940s memorabilia -- original boater straw hats, tie clips from the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, boxes packed with original photographs of legendary mobsters -- lay under several feet of water. He spotted only a few favorites that survived, including a double-breasted suit and a 1920s beaver fur fedora.

He stepped outside. Only a slim strip of the dish towel tied to his front door was still white.

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p.j.huffstutter@latimes.com